“Illusion of choice” is a somewhat recent concern in the gaming community, a critical phrase coined in reaction to the rise of interactive, decision-based games peddled by game studios like Telltale and Supermassive.

In these games, which include Telltale’s riff on The Walking Dead and Supermassive’s slasherific Until Dawn, players don’t engage in physical battles so much as they do emotional and mental ones, with the player’s decisions presumably determining the fates of characters and, by extension, the story’s outcome. Play enough of them, however, and you’ll realize just how little agency you actually have. We all wind up in the same place; some of us just hear different dialogue along the way.

Film-maker Steven Soderbergh offers no such illusion with his new project, Mosaic, an interactive murder mystery starring Sharon Stone and Garrett Hedlund that’s viewable via its own app. “It’s a fixed universe,” he told The Verge last week, making it clear that the app’s interactivity – viewers choose the order in which they experience the seven-hour drama by navigating multiple story nodes on a narrative map – doesn’t give Mosaic’s audience any control over the events. “I’m still pulling the strings,” he asserts. What Soderbergh is offering is a greater sense of freedom for viewers – using the app, they can, at their leisure, follow the characters and plotlines that interest them rather than riding the rails of the creator. And, if that’s not your bag, HBO will be airing Soderbergh’s cut as a six-episode series in January.

It’s a project Soderbergh’s been working on for roughly three years, and also one that fits firmly in his wheelhouse. Throughout his career, the director has sought not only to tell stories, but to change the way in which we consume them. His 1998 thriller The Limey, for example, is edited in a way that disrupts chronology and structure by reflecting the peripatetic, untrustworthy nature of human thought.

On TV, Soderbergh’s preferred playground these days, he’s been steadily subverting the medium’s base perceptions, first by fostering a fierce directorial consistency with his work on Showtime’s dearly departed The Knick and now with his casual disruption of season structure as executive producer of The Girlfriend Experience. The show’s sophomore outing, which premiered earlier this month, tells two entirely separate narratives – one from each of its creators – with the episodes airing in pairs. “[W]hat that does is to really amplify the wild divergence in approaches that both of them took, while at the same time, sharing a sort of common core theme,” he told Deadline.

But Mosaic remains Soderbergh’s boldest venture to date, as the project’s aim is to activate the audience in ways art rarely can. Modern viewers watch TV while scrolling their smartphones anyway, so by factoring their devices into the experience Soderbergh is effectively demanding engagement while negating that slow drift into social media. That sense of engagement is fostered further with the app’s “discoveries”, which manifest as supplemental videos, news clippings and PDFs that periodically appear to provide further context. They feel like clues, and to divert into them is to indulge your inner investigator.

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Yet they rarely satisfy. They’re not necessary. And this is where Mosaic begins to evoke not Telltale’s interactivity, but rather the sprawling, open world titles of Bethesda Studios’ The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. In these games, the amount of freedom a player is granted can begin to feel overwhelming. Every item can be examined, every sheet of paper read, every townsperson interrogated. As the main mission lies untouched, players/viewers simply wander, determined to explore rather than engage. That’s satisfying for a while, but it can give way to the anxiety that maybe we’re missing something. We become completionists rather than consumers. And in the end we’re left not with the sense that we saw a good story, but that we saw everything there was to see. Those are different experiences.

But maybe the method of engagement is destined to transcend the story. That’s certainly the case for many video games. But this isn’t a video game, nor is it, by Soderbergh’s estimation, a TV show or a movie – “It’s something else,” he says. And while whatever that actually is is exciting, it also has the potential to leave you with the lingering thought that maybe, just maybe, you did it wrong. Sometimes, one can argue, it’s best to leave the storytelling to the storytellers.